Tagged: All Is Full Of Love

The first half of 2010 has been eventful for music, hasn’t it? Epic break-up albums from Spoon, Joanna Newsom, Erykah Badu, and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. Controversial music videos from Lady Gaga, Badu, and M.I.A. Janelle Monáe cornering the “Hey Ya” market with “Tightrope.” The initial run of David Simon’s Treme, which is a feast for music geeks.Courtney Love re-emerging like some fucked-up phoenix rising from the ashes of coke and pixie dust. Corin Tucker making a solo album. The Lilith Fair relaunching this summer, though unfortunately at one point in support of anti-choice brainwashing complexes crisis pregnancy centers. Christina Aguilera collaborating with some interesting folks on her new album. And so many amazing album covers. Goddamn.

By my count, we have four new covers to talk about: the Dap-Kings’ I Learned the Hard Way, Hole’s Nobody’s Daughter, Monáe’s soon-to-be-released The ArchAndroid, and Aguilera’s Bionic. As I want to write proper reviews for the first three titles, I figured today’s post could be on D*Face‘s cover art for Bionic, which doesn’t come out until June. I’ll admit that I’m pretty nervous that I don’t see Santigold, M.I.A., and Le Tigre listed as producers on the album’s Wiki entry. While I do note Ladytron, I’ll also point out that it’s the dudes in the band who worked with her. The lead single “Not Myself Tonight,” has been released and I like it even if it’s slipping on the charts. The Hype Williams-directed video is set to premiere on Vevo tomorrow, though you can look at snippets and stills from the singer’s Web site. The cover was revealed last month and to whet our appetites, I thought we could briefly look at it.

Cover to Bionic (RCA, 2010); image courtesy of wikimedia.org

Haters can say that the lead single is derivative, but that’s one hell of a cover. Admittedly, the critique is pretty close to the surface: the cover shows the obscured constructedness of pop stars, the technological interventions on their voices and bodies, and the potential disembodiment of normative and subservient female glamor. I’d also bring up Richard Dyer’s call in White to make whiteness strange. It also seems to recall Daft Punk’s politically dire and underrated Human After All and the corporate shills and politicians in They Live.

Still from "They Live"; image courtesy of movingimagesource.us

As I mentioned in my review of Badu’s new album linked above, the cyborg — and the cyborg as doll — is a racially fraught cultural figure that black women have channeled in their work, particularly Missy Elliott and Lil Kim. I’d add Monáe and Nicki Minaj (channeling Kim) to that list.

Nicki Minaj, in doll form; image courtesy of rightonmag.com

I’d also point out that Björk and Chris Cunningham challenged the racial and sexual connotations of the cyborg in the music video for “All Is Full Of Love.”

Twin cyborg Björks making out; image courtesy of bjork.com

I’m not convinced that Aguilera has done anything new here, but continue to be interested with whom and what she chooses to align.

It’s pretty easy to objectify and make normative lesbian sex (for more on the subject, I recommend Ann Ciasullo’s essay “Making her (in)visible: Cultural representations of lesbianism and the lesbian body in the 1990s” as a starting point). Music videos, which already have a bad rap for objectifying female bodies for a (presumably) male audience, are no exception. But what happens when the musician is having sex with herself. And not just masturbating, but going to town on her twin?

I for one think this is awesome — simultaneously an assertion of the self, the self’s sexual desires, and the self’s fragmentability. Also, this assertion is channeled through queerable female bodies (Björk as cyborg; P!nk as a model of “butch feminine”). An assertion from famous, marketable pop stars, no less.